One year ago today... and finally a decision

A year can certainly be a long time.  While shorter measurements of time can sometimes feel as though they are flying by in the moment, I have always felt as if years only seem to have passed quickly once they have completed.  Looking back at this previous year, it certainly feels, at this point in time, as if it came and went swiftly and without much difficulty.

Predictably, the days that we were nervous or sad or homesick seem, from this vantage point, to be very few and far between.  More prominently featured in our memories are our times spent with aunts and uncles in Berlin and Prague and Poland, our time spent with grandmother touring Switzerland and Italy, or time exploring Amsterdam alone.  Also prominent in our minds is the last time each of us were home- me in June and L Mama and L Rizzy in November of last year (9 months!  Really has 9 months passed so quickly?!).  We held these memories close and tried to keep them as fresh as possible to help us continue to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel: the knowledge that at the end of our time here, we would all get to come home.  Maybe not to our actual home, but to our homeland.  Where our friends and family, whom we have missed so much over the last 365 days, have continued their lives in the bliss that only can be obtained when you can actually read and understand every single label in the grocery store.  Meanwhile, we have toiled in our hotbox of an apartment, spent countless hours translating in the Netto downstairs, wrestled with German bureaucracy, overcome self doubt and self pity, missed our dog, and faced financial armageddon.  In spite of said obstacles, we were able to spend a fantastic amount of time with our son, open our minds to different ways of living, make some good friends, achieve a conception, secure board certification, travel the world, and in the end, secure a decent job in the US.

So while nothing is 100% sure in this business until the first day on the job, we are pleased and relieved to announce that we will be moving to New York City to work at Lenox Hill Hospital doing actual cardiac surgery.  In 23 days time we will fly to London, tour through England and Scotland, meet up with grandmother in Dublin and tour Ireland, then return to Southampton, England to catch our ship homeward bound for New York City where we will arrive on the morning of September 21.  When we were presented the opportunity to come here we were told that upon returning we would be able to go anywhere in the states and practice.  We were also told I would be operating all day, everyday.  While all these projections certainly did not come true, and at the end of the year we look back at our time here with fondness, we are happy to be moving on with the next phase of our life.